Replit Teams transformed the SkillsEngine Product and Design team from a traditional no-code department to a prolific team that writes, shares, and ships code. In the process, the team unblocked engineering bottlenecks, improved prototype fidelity, shipped faster, and saved thousands of dollars and resources.
"I have tried every no-code tool and AI app. I have been coding for nearly 15 years now. Nothing has sparked the creative code output that Replit has for me. I have coded more in the past 12 months than the previous 10 years because it makes it so easy to get started and just try stuff. We can just focus on building ideas.” - Max Miner, Executive Director of Product and Design
SkillsEngine overview
SkillsEngine develops data services and tools for employers, educators, and workforce interests. Employers use SkillsEngine data to confidently assess their workforce capabilities and hiring needs. Educators use features like skill-based job profiles to plan curricula that meet current job market needs.
Challenges
For the SkillsEngine Product and Design team, speed of iteration and execution is a critical measure of success. Two tasks commonly take up their time:
- Prototyping - Creating and testing MVP versions of new applications and ideas internally and externally
- Internal tools - Using APIs and integrations to connect systems or make batch updates to existing systems
However, both have significant challenges: core engineering resources are limited, and hiring external contractors can be costly. Using no-code tools is an option, but SkillsEngine found them cumbersome, wasting significant time working around limitations:
“We are basically making the decision between four lines of code or four days of working around no-code tools.”
Prototypes and internal tools are better solved with a code-first approach, but the team did not have an engineering background. Replit makes the painful aspects of software development, like setting up the development environment, managing dependencies, and more, extremely easy.
That is, until Executive Director of Product and Design Max Miner introduced his team to Replit.
Prototyping on Replit
Since adoption, the SkillsEngine Product and Design teams have used Replit Teams to prototype rapidly.
Instant development environments and pre-built team templates come with common components and user interfaces for designers. This lowers the barrier so much that designers with no coding experience have been able to build prototypes on Replit. When assistance is needed, technical teammates can jump in and pair program with live multiplayer (like a Google Doc), both unblocking and upskilling the org.
Recently, the team had an idea for a Job Description generator. Rather than wait for engineering capacity, the designers:
- Opened a Flask Repl
- Generated code to use an LLM
- Used AI to add a Streamlit frontend
In less than a day, they had a working MVP prototype they could share internally and with customers to validate the concept. Once the project value was clear, they setup time with engineering to discuss prioritizing the project.
This tight iteration speed has had a huge impact on the organization:
"We have shipped 8 applications that would have never made it there if not for Replit."
Jumping into Replit is producing positive effects on collaboration:
- Action bias. Less talking about ideas and more building
- A deeper understanding of the code so they can design accordingly
- Higher quality prototypes at handoff to engineering
- Accelerated development from idea to software
"I will have cut weeks of work off that R&D project."
SkillsEngine is shipping faster than ever before. As Max Miner says here, “This velocity wasn’t possible before Replit.”
Building data automations and internal tools
Existing marketing tech and data tools are useful but fragmented. Like others, SkillsEngine often runs data jobs where they need to:
- Extract data from a source (e.g., CRM)
- Transform it (e.g., add columns or attributes)
- Pass the data to another source (e.g., new target, same target)
These workloads are too large to manage in spreadsheets. With Replit, they can accelerate data jobs at scale with a few lines of AI-generated Python.
"We have written scripts for batch updates that have saved us thousands in contractor hours."
The SkillsEngine team tests scripts on sample data. Then run the job at scale, saving hours of contractor or engineering resources.
Link to the SkillsEngine AI Career Mapper
Impact
Using Replit Teams, the SkillsEngine Product and Design team has driven company-changing value:
- Shipping 8 prototypes and applications, they otherwise would not have
- Cutting weeks off research and development time for new features
- Saving tens of thousands of dollars in contractor spend on data scripts
Test out their Interview question generator and job post generator.
